Sarah Small’s photography brings together groupings of distinctive visual personalities into fresh interaction in scenarios she contrives from the ground-up. Despite constructing these scenes, she captures authentic experiences of curiosity, unease, sensuality and alienation, often occurring simultaneously, just under the surface of her candy-colored, starkly-composed images.

This lecture will discuss how issues like technical considerations, artistic strategy, and the practicalities of photographing humans cohere to make her images what they are. Through a discussion of three of her own works, Small will explore how such issues intersect with her personal trajectory in her work. Sarah will talk about how the mundane details of a shoot – from choosing locations to casting models and setting up lighting – inform and are informed by models’ responses to one another and the experience of being photographed. In turn, Small will share how these considerations relate to both the vision that guides her work and the eventual images she produces. By sharing personal anecdotes about her artistic growth, including disappointments and (sometimes lucky) mistakes, Small will discuss how she has come to understand the relationship between these elements, and how problems, practicalities, and improvisations can be creatively enlisted together in dynamic images.

www.SarahSmall.com